What a week! Of course Halloween was our highlight, and it was so fun to come to school in our costumes!
We made magic potions as one of our Halloween activities, adding skeletons, eyeballs, spiders and other ghoulish ingredients.
We also had a spooky tunnel for those who were brave enough to enter…we turned out the hallway lights to make it extra dark inside.
The best part of Halloween at Small Friends is making our magic brew together at snack time. Thank you for sending juice boxes and pouches – the ingredients were perfect and it was delicious!
On Monday we made handprint witch scenes, using green and orange paint plus some fun Halloween foamies.
The kids also learned how to play a shape game, categorizing pieces by shape and color. They identified circles, triangles, trapezoids, hexagons, rectangles and squares.
We put a props from a couple of the stories we’ve told during our group time out in the puppet theater and the kids retold them. They love to sell “tickets” to the audience for these shows. Seating is limited!
Elsewhere in the classroom, other fall themes began to emerge. In the texture table, flax seeds replaced popcorn kernels. There were acrylic fall shapes – leaves, apples, pumpkins – along with scoops, buckets and the windmills.
Kinetic sand, squirrels and pieces of wood made for some dry fun in the water tub. On Thursday we put water back in, along with some water wheels which were a hit!
At the light table there were a variety of colorful shapes for sorting and stacking. Some of the kids made patterns which was fun to see.
We pulled some of our smaller block choices out and put them on the building table. These are always available in our building area, but sometimes we like to feature them in different ways to see what the children will do with them. On Thursday we replaced them with Duplos which we will leave out for at least a few more days. This class loves to build things!
There were lots of different options at the creation station and the kids used their imaginations to combine the materials in new ways.
After Halloween, the remainder of the week was devoted to fall projects. We did leaf rubbings on Wednesday. We hung some in our classroom, and if children did more than one they were welcome to take the additional rubbings home.
We put October objects in our memory boxes – everyone got to choose one of the little spooks that were out in our haunted house a couple of weeks ago. They also added bat and pumpkin stickers to their sticker books and dictated a favorite memory.
Thursday we used a variety of materials to make prints on fall-colored paper, and then chose either an owl or squirrel silhouette to glue on top (thank you to the Federighi family for prepping our silhouettes!). These are on display inside the classroom.
We also played a squirrel counting game, trying to fill a tree with acorns before the wind came along and blew them all away.
Here are some more photos from our free time – there are always so many things going on around the room!
Scarlet and Coco got some good attention and play time!
During our group time we played “Five Little Pumpkins” one more time, read a few more of our favorite Halloween stories, did our Halloween Yoga flow, and started reading stories about Fall.
We had some great weather for playing outside. The kids have been enjoying different versions of chasing games, playing on the logs, and riding the bikes.
We are well into our fall activities now, and next week is all about apples, apples, apples! We’ll see you soon!
Warmly,
Lisa and Jelena
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